I Have Never Once Felt It

Nat is twenty-four and she has never felt anything, and she has stopped expecting to.

She believes it. That is the strange part and it is why this has been going on so long without anybody noticing. If you sat her down and asked her whether she thinks it is true, she would say yes, and she would give you good reasons, and she has actually read some things.

She just does not feel it.

Not once. Not in the room where the lights go down and somebody plays the same four chords for eleven minutes and the girl beside her has her hand over her face. Not on the weekend away where three people said afterward that something happened to them. Not at nine, not at fifteen, not last month.

She described it to herself once as being in a cinema where everybody is laughing and she can see that the film is good and she can follow the plot and she is not laughing.

And what she has concluded, without ever putting it into a sentence, is that whatever the other people have, she does not have it, and she is running on secondhand information and eventually somebody is going to notice.

She told Bex in the spring. Bex runs the Thursday thing and is about forty and is, by a distance, the most obviously believing person Nat has ever met.

Nat had it all planned out. She expected to be told to pray about it, or that God speaks in different ways, or something warm and slightly deflecting, and she had decided in advance not to be annoyed.

And Bex listened to the whole thing and then said, "Yeah. Neither have I, mostly."

And Nat said, "What?"

And Bex said it again, and then said something about a handful of times in twenty years, and how one of them was in a car park and she still does not know what to do with it.

Nat did not sleep well that night, and not because she was upset.

She was thrown. Because if that is true of Bex, then the thing she has been using as her test does not measure what she thought it measured, and she has been reading a blank dial for fifteen years and drawing conclusions from it.

Now let me ask you what you have been using as the test.

Because if this is yours you have an instrument, and it is your own inside, and you have been checking it since you were about nine and it has never moved, and you have never once asked whether it is the right instrument.

Whose witness it is

Paul writes a sentence in Romans 8 about assurance, and the striking thing is who is doing the work in it.

The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God.Romans 8:16

The Spirit Himself.

Not: your spirit produces a feeling and you check it. The witness in that sentence originates outside you. It is a testimony given, and your spirit is the second party to it, not the source.

Which means the assurance Paul is describing is not something you generate and then inspect. It is something done to you, and the doing of it does not have to arrive as an emotion, and this verse says nothing whatever about how it feels.

And look at the word children. Not recruits. Not members. A child's standing in a family is not established by how the child feels about it, and there is no age at which a child's feelings become the deciding evidence in that relationship. A ten-year-old sulking in a bedroom is exactly as much somebody's child as they were at breakfast.

So hear this said over you, lying awake after a conversation that went nowhere near where you expected. You are a child of God and the witness to that is given by the Spirit rather than manufactured by you, and fifteen years of a blank dial has never once been evidence about where you stand. That is written in Romans in exactly that order, with the Spirit as the one testifying, and He is the one who has been doing it whether or not the reading ever came through to you.

Now let me be careful about the feelings themselves, because I am not going to sneer at them.

They are real. Bex had one in a car park and it was not nothing, and the girl with her hand over her face is not performing. God moves people and He has always moved people and some of them are wrecked by it, and I would not take one minute of that away from anybody.

The problem is not that other people feel things. The problem is what you decided the feeling was for.

You made it the test. And a test has to be able to give a negative result to be worth anything, so every year you did not feel it, you scored yourself another year of failing, and fifteen years of that adds up to a settled conclusion about your own standing that you reached with the wrong instrument entirely.

Here is what the actual evidence has been, the whole time.

You are still here.

Nobody makes you. You are twenty-four and you could stop on Thursday and there would be no consequence anybody could enforce, and about four people would text you and then it would be over. You have had every reason and every opportunity to quietly drift, which is what people do, and you have not.

And more than that, you still want it. You have never once wanted to stop wanting it. That wanting has been running for fifteen years in the complete absence of any reward you could feel, which is not something a person can keep up on their own, and if you could produce it yourself you would have used it to produce a feeling by now.

The word says it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure, and to will is the wanting. And the Spirit of God is the one who cries Abba, Father in a believer, and Paul says elsewhere that no one says Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit, which means the plainest, driest, most unemotional statement of faith you have ever made was Him.

The choosing was made before the world was, and it did not run through your nervous system on the way. This tradition has never taught people to look inward and hunt for a warm feeling, and the reason is not coldness. It is that the ground is outside you: what He did, what He said, and what He has already settled, none of which moves when your inside does not.